As you might expect, plenty was written by the people who saw much more of Thursday night’s epic Yankee-Red Sox game than I did. Here are a few highlights from the pinstriped angle:

• Derek Jacques, who was at the game:

The hardest part of writing about this game is that it’s hard to identify what “the story” was. Was it the Sox’ last gasp at at keeping the Division race close? Not really — it’s still only July 1, and I don’t think you can stick a fork in a team that’s just two games out of the Wild Card. Was it the young lefthander holding his own against the Boston lineup? That was nice, but by the time the game ended, you could hardly remember that Brad Halsey started.

The story, if you could call it that, was a game that showcased everything that’s good about baseball. Big home runs. Beautiful defensive plays. Extra innings, which beats the living daylights out of “overtime” in any other sport.

Red Sox fans were all over the stadium, like an invading army or a colony of intestinal parasites, depending on your point of view. They’ve been bolder than usual over the past two years — Yankee Stadium security has improved to the point that the Beantowners don’t have to make out a will before wearing their colors in the Bronx. The Sox fans were fairly sedate last night, however, still suffering from the gut punch they suffered on Wednesday, when David Ortiz decided to re-enact the Bill Buckner play.

• Cliff Corcoran, who was also in the House o’ Ruth and reports that it took him a half hour to get out of Yankee Stadium and until 3 AM to get back to his New Jersey domicile:

It’s interesting that a game that will likely be remembered well beyond this season seemed so unimportant going in. The Yankees had a seven-and-a-half-game lead on the Red Sox. They’d taken the first two games of the series, clinching a series win. And they were sending rookie Brad Halsey to the mound in just his third major league start against Pedro Martinez, who had dominated the Yankees in his previous start at the stadium earlier this year. Had the Yankees lost this game in an uneventful fashion, it would have meant no more than the one game in the standings it accounted for. Instead it may have defined this team.

• YES Network’s Steven Goldman, who found eight great plotlines within a single game:

The label “historic” does not fit neatly on most regular season ballgames, if only because there are a few games each year that qualify. There have been only 14 regular-season perfect games since the dawn of the 20th century, but highly dramatic, seesaw contests with pennant race implications happen, at least for the Yankees, roughly once a year. That means there have been 50 such contests since the mid-1950s alone.

Let us, then, not rush to call the Thursday, July 1 contest between the Yankees and the Red Sox “historic,” which turns out to be a less than unique designation, and call it something better instead: perfect. This game showcased baseball at its best. It possessed clutch pitching, dramatic hitting, long home runs, baserunning, defensive gems, heroic sacrifice, and more interweaving plotlines than two soap operas laid on top of one another.

• Hardball Times’ Larry Mahnken, who referenced the greatest sportswriter of them all, Red Smith, with his article’s title (“Fiction is Dead”):

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it — and I’m still not sure I do. This was the type of game that makes you believe in miracles and curses, mystique and aura, and destiny. It had heroes and it had goats, unlikely comebacks and lost opportunities, highlight-reel plays and errors. It was the kind of game that makes you a baseball fan until the day you die.

…If it wasn’t Yankees/Red Sox, if it wasn’t such a crucial game for the Red Sox, it still would have been the best game of the year. That it was these two teams, that so much did ride on it for Boston, makes it one of the great games in Yankees history. It wasn’t Bucky Dent, it wasn’t Aaron Boone, but it was almost as exhilirating, almost as heartbreaking, and every bit as memorable.

There are people in this world who do not like baseball, there are people who find it boring. But last night’s game showed, once again, why baseball is the greatest game ever invented; it will always find a new way to surprise you. Even a poorly played game like last night’s contest can be a classic. If that’s boring, then nothing in this world is interesting.

• Baseball Prospectus’ Joe Sheehan marveled at the game’s great plays and examined his own preseason take:

All of the attention after the game was focused on Derek Jeter, who tore up his face diving into the third-base box seats after making a running catch to end the top of the 12th. Without taking anything away from Jeter, though, the play of the game was Alex Rodriguez’s double-play turn in the 11th. On a ball that took a strange bounce just to stay fair, Rodriguez made a stab, a tag of the base, and a perfect, only-line-he-had throw to the plate to prevent the tying run from scoring.

Nothing against Jeter, whose catch — of a ball that I think was going to land fair and score two runs — required a great jump and excellent raw speed, but Rodriguez had to do about four things correctly in less than two seconds to get the optimum result, and he did. Jeter’s play was simpler, although the requirements of making it — a sprint into short left field — led him to injure himself after completing the catch.

We’re dealing in gradations of excellence here, which is really what last night was all about. Keith Foulke wiggles out of a jam? OK, here’s Mariano Rivera escaping a tougher one. Pokey Reese makes a highlight-reel catch? Here comes Rodriguez, and then Jeter, pushing him to the cutting-room floor. Manny Ramirez comes up with another huge hit with his team up against the wall? Nice, but the Yankees get down to their last strike, more stars on the bench than in the lineup, and get back-to-back hits from the waiver-bait segment of the roster.

On ESPN the other night, Peter Gammons mentioned that the Yankees have never blown a 6.5-game lead. That lead is now 8.5 games, nine in the loss column, and although I’ve insisted all along that the Red Sox would overtake the Bombers once they got healthy, I’m now convinced I was wrong.

There’s a theme that’s starting to gain ground. Sox fans are backing away from this team, as if they knew all along that it wasn’t really that good. Given that this is virtually the same team that Massachusetts wanted to marry a year ago, but with Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke added, I don’t buy it. They didn’t bunt or run all that much last year either, and the lack of double plays now being cited as a key to their demise has more to do with the fact that they don’t 1) put runners on first base or 2) get ground balls than any fatal flaw.

• Alex Belth, who mustered genuine sympathy for Red Sox Nation:

In the late ’90s when we wondered how the future would treat the Big Three [shortstops], who would have thought it would come to this? Each player figured dramatically in last night’s game. Jeter was valiant, Rodriguez, brilliant, and Garciaparra was impotent. This morning, BDD [Boston Dirt Dogs] posted a rumor that would have Nomar packing his bags for Los Angeles. A three-team deal including Toronto would bring Odalis Perez and Carlos Delgado to Beantown. While nothing has happend yet, it’s likely that Theo Epstein will make a bold move soon (he was at work acquiring two pitchers in two different deals this afternoon). There is still a lot of season to play and the Sox aren’t done yet. But Garciaparra certainly looked like a short-timer last night.

All of which leaves me feeling incredibly sad. Sad that Garciaparra is so unhappy, sad that a franchise player like Nomar is likely to leave Boston disgruntled and bruised like Lynn and Fisk and Clemens and Vaughn. I’m especially sad for Red Sox fans.

As you might imagine, there’s plenty of noise being made in RSN, with much of the frustration centered around Nomar. From ESPN’s Bill Simmons:

On the other side, we have Nomar Garciaparra, who sulked in the Red Sox dugout for the entirety of last night’s game. Either he’s getting traded, or he’s determined to turn the city against him. Boston is a weird place. If everyone is standing at the top step of the dugout, and you’re sitting awkwardly on the bench with a “I wish this game would end, I could go for some pizza” face, you may as well just start strangling kittens on live TV at that point. I’m not a betting man — okay, that’s a complete lie — but unless Nomar gets traded in the next 48 hours, I would bet that last night’s game became one of his defining moments in Boston. And not in a good way.

Looking at the big picture, yesterday was the final chapter of “The Tale of Three Great Shortstops,” the three guys who were supposed to battle for supremacy through the end of the decade. So much for that angle. There was Jeter recklessly crashing into the stands, the ultimate competitor, a franchise player in the truest sense of the word. There was A-Rod greeting Cairo at home plate at the end of the game, a multi-kajillionaire just happy be involved in baseball’s version of the Cold War … even if it meant giving up on his dream of becoming the greatest shortstop ever.

And there was Nomar, the fading superstar who helped the team blow two games in Yankee Stadium, then showed little interest in even watching the third one. He’s been declining steadily for three seasons now — his body breaking down, his defense slipping, his lack of plate discipline a bigger problem than ever. He always seemed to enjoy himself on the field, almost like a little kid, but even that’s a distant memory. Maybe his spirit was shattered by the rumored deal to Chicago last winter. Only he knows the answer to that one. For his sake, I hope he’s getting traded this week. After last night’s display, there’s no going back.

Bring on the Pokey Era. Please.

Maybe it’s because I missed the previous week of baseball, including the first 27 innings of the Yanks-Sox series, but I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around all of this. Despite the echoes of last fall’s Game Seven and other similarly tilted results, Thursday night’s game decided nothing, no matter how great the win was for the Yanks, or how devastating the loss was for the Sox. Die hard fans, whether they’re Bomber backers making World Series plans or Red Sox Nationalists looking for a drainpipe over which to throw the noose rope — not to mention professional pundits — would do well to remember that the Sox took six of seven from the Yanks in April, when the shoe was on the other foot. They still hold an edge in the season series, 6-4. Curse, shmurse, this was two teams meeting at a time extremely opportune for one and lousy for the other. It’s not too different from the situation several weeks ago, despite the reversed fortunes of the two teams.

As ESPN’s Eric Neel points out, the two teams are extremely close in run differential; in fact, the Sox have a higher expected (Pythagorean) winning percentage, .564 to .558 through Friday. The Yanks are a lofty seven games above their EWP owing to their ability to come from behind, while the Sox are two games below thiers. But these things have a strong tendency to even themselves out over the course of a year.

As a Yankee fan, there is one thing I take from their recent history against the Sox: the Pedro mystique, at least insofar as Martinez being some kind of Yankee killer, is as dead as the Bambino. The whiny-assed, Jheri-Curled, diva bitch goddess of an ace is 11-9 with a 2.90 ERA in 29 career starts against the Yankees, including the postseason and one start as an Expo. But his teams are only 11-18 in those starts:

1997  1-0

1998  0-3

1999  2-0 including 1-0 in ALCS

2000  2-3

2001  1-5

2002  3-1

2003  1-5 including 0-2 in ALCS

2004  1-1

TOT  11-18

For all of his bluster (“Why don’t we just wake up the Bambino, and maybe I’ll drill him in the ass?”) and machismo (his eruption in Game Three of last year’s ALCS, his plunking of Gary Sheffield on Thursday night), his decreased stamina — he hasn’t pitched more than 7.1 innings in any start against the Yanks since 2001 — means the Bombers can merely wait him out and feast on the Sox bullpen. He’s still a great pitcher… when he’s pitching. But these epic Yanks-Sox battles have a way of waiting until the wee hours to be decided, when that Jheri Curl is dripping onto his warmup jacket while he sits on the bench, watching his team fritter away his hard work. Poor, poor, Pedro.